Jacob Grier

The new iPhone is coming. It includes 3G networking, GPS, and readiness for new software apps. It starts at just $199 for the 8 gig version, $299 for the 16. With my Verizon contract up and my current phone near the breaking point, I don’t think I’ll be able to resist.

The launch date is July 11. My birthday is July 12. Just sayin’.

Lifehacker posts a trick for getting access to the new GMail Labs features that aren’t yet available on every account. To do it, just paste the following link into your address bar while signed into GMail: https://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=1#settings

This gives you access to 13 new features in the settings tab. One fixes the annoying GMail habit of placing your signature below quoted text. Another adds alternatives to the star icon. While I’m partial to the simplicity of having only one icon with which to mark emails, I’ve been using the stars for the dual purpose of marking important messages and messages I need to reply to. Having one more icon to choose from lets me the divide this function.

The other 11 options aren’t as immediately useful to me, but you might like them.

As a noted expert on unproductivity, I got randomly quoted in this Associated Press story about secular sabbaths:

… in an increasingly wired, material world, a version of that spiritual tradition known as a “Secular Sabbath” is gaining appeal outside religious communities.

Jacob Grier, a 25-year-old blogger in Arlington, Virginia, has instituted “no laptop” Sundays for the past two years.

He got tired of working at his local coffee shop and seeing everybody hidden behind their computer screens, ignoring each other, so he started leaving his laptop at home and bringing books instead. He started talking to people at the shop instead of interacting with others on the Internet.

Now, his routine has expanded to incorporate some other friends and a whole day’s worth of unwired activities. They meet first for coffee, they read, they go to a neighborhood cafe for a late lunch, come back, and close the session by sitting outside and smoking cigars.

Grier is an atheist, but he says what his Sundays offer is similar to what some people look for in religious services.

“The large reason people go to church is to bond with their community, and in the same way, you can get that from going to the coffee shop every week,” he says.

Hey, look at that! I said something positive about going to church!

Victrola Coffee, which started turning off the wi-fi on weekends a few years ago, also gets a mention.

Amazon.com has announced that it’s entering the wine business. That’s great news if you’re in one of the 26 states that allows direct shipping; Virginia, in a rare instance of sanity, is among them.

It’s even better news if you’re looking for work and know your wines. Amazon doesn’t have stock yet, so it’s seeking a wine buyer to acquire a “massive new product selection.” I’m working three jobs already, but I could be persuaded…

Good gravy, what will the nanny statists think of next?

Should Blackberries and other potentially addictive devices come with a health warning? It’s an idea floated by UK researchers studying technology addiction…

[Researcher Nada Kakabadse says that] “companies offer technologies like PDAs and Blackberies and just expect people to learn how to use them. They don’t consider the possible negative sides. New technology gives a feeling of having more control, but it may be only a feeling.

We don’t want to be in a situation in a few years similar to that with fast food or tobacco today. We need to pay attention to how people react to potentially habit-forming technologies and respond with appropriate education and policies.”

New Scientist reporter Tom Simonite goes right along with her, concluding that “pressure from outside agencies like governments could be the only way to save us from an addiction epidemic.” What next, banning those sexy iPhone ads?

Whatever that means, it apparently allows using government connections to hobble your competitors. Google is disappointingly, yet predictably, considering using anti-trust laws to oppose the possible Microsoft takeover of Yahoo!:

With Microsoft bidding nearly $45 billion to buy Yahoo, Google has begun to lay the groundwork to try to delay, and possibly derail, any deal. Google executives have asked company lobbyists to develop a political strategy to challenge the acquisition, which could threaten Google’s dominance of Internet advertising. Google’s top legal officer posted a statement Sunday that criticized the proposed deal…

Microsoft enlarged its Washington staff in the late 1990s after it came under antitrust assault in the Clinton administration. Its lobbying shop is considered among the most effective in the capital, and it has retained more than 20 law firms, lobbying companies and press relations operations for an array of political and regulatory issues.

Google’s Washington office is less than three years old and has been steadily growing. In fall 2006, it established a political action committee and has since used Democrats from the Podesta Group lobbyists, two former Republican senators — Connie Mack and Dan Coats at the law firm of King & Spalding, and the law firm of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.

Google recently moved to larger quarters, with 27,000 square feet of space including a game room, open work areas, free lunches and environmentally friendly features like recycled rainwater — a smaller version of its Silicon Valley headquarters.

David Boaz lamented Google’s entrance into Washington back in 2006.

A few months ago I made the switch from Bloglines to Google Reader. After a short adjustment period I’m completely happy with the move. There was just one thing I missed: Bloglines makes it easy to see how many subscribers each blog has, giving a rough indication of its popularity. Google, for some reason, buries the data. Luckily, there is a way to get it. Searching for a blog on the “add subscription” tab will show relevant feeds along with the number of subscribers of each.

A feature I wasn’t aware of until today is the trends page. Clicking on this provides information about your reading habits, such as the fact that in the past 30 days I’ve read (more accurately skimmed) 7,766 items from my 330 subscriptions.

So there you go, bloggers, two tools to show you just how much time you burn reading other people’s blogs and just how few people read your own. Cheers!

[Hat tip: Rumors Daily.]

By some strange sequence of events I ended up on NBC4 last night talking about blogging. Watch and learn how you too can make tens of dollars putting your opinion online! Also, keep an eye out for my mysterious twin brother “David” Grier, milk steaming action at Murky Coffee, and a cameo appearance by Chad Wilcox as blogger number 2. Partial transcript available here.

Grant McCracken notes that with little fanfare Google has added presentation software to its documents suite, finally filling the Powerpoint void:

This is a momentous occasion. It marks the end of the Microsoft hegemony. Between them, Google and Firefox now give us an entire suite, a web browser, a word processor, a spreadsheet, gmail and now Powerpoint. God almighty, we are free at last.

I haven’t used presentation software since 2003 or so, but if you do and want a web-based alternative, this looks pretty good.

This is also a good time to mention the improvements in Google Analytics, the web stats tracker. They’ve been around for a while, but since I wasn’t all that impressed by the initial launch it took me a while to check them out. It’s great! The map overlay is especially cool, and the stats offer much more depth than the free version of SiteMeter (though no convenient monthly comparisons that I can find). If you’ve got a website, I highly recommend it.

Interruptions and distractions can make reading long articles on the web a time-consuming task, so I was intrigued to come across ZAP Reader, a site that outputs text by flashing words one at a time at whatever rate you choose. The default is 300 words per minute, which I find a bit slow. (According to this test, that’s about the speed I naturally read web pages.) At 375 I can still keep up and understand what I’m reading; 400 seems doable with a little practice.

The reader works because it forces you to stop subvocalizing words and ignore incoming distractions, and because most of the time you can miss a few words and still comprehend meaning. It’s not a service you’d want to use all the time, but for when you just want to mainline a lengthy, factual article, it’s a handy tool. Cut and paste to give it a try.

[Hat tip: David Tufte.]

The internet reads my thoughts and turns them into reality. Or at least that’s how it seems sometimes.

On the way to lunch on Monday, a colleague and I were discussing Keith Ferrazzi’s book Never Eat Alone. “Discussing” is too strong a word, as neither of us has actually read it, but I think idea in the title is great. I half-seriously suggested posting a Craigslist ad seeking random lunch meetings in the neighborhood in which I work, but thought better of it.

The very same day I came across a WorldChanging post about Noonhat, a brand new website designed by Brian Dorsey. The idea is simple: place a circle on a map indicating your location, choose a date, and enter your email address. On the date you’ve chosen, Noonhat puts you in touch with other locals available on the same date so you can make lunch arrangements. You all pick a restaurant, meet, and enjoy a meal with some totally strange strangers.

I signed up for a lunch today not yet expecting anyone from DC to appear. To my surprise, a guy from just a few blocks away had signed up as well (turns out he met the creator at the Gnomedex conference). I wasn’t sure what to expect, but given that to be on the site he had to at least be up to date on internet trends, I figured that if worse came to worst we could just talk about LOLcats for half an hour.

Luckily, we didn’t have to do that. We hit it off quickly, found some common interests, and kept the conversation flowing all through the lunch without a single “i can has cheezburger” joke. Not too surprisingly given the neighborhood, we also discovered we have somewhat similar jobs promoting the work of our employers, making our exchange not just personally enjoyable but productive, too. We’ll probably meet up again.

If the site continues to add users I could see Noonhatting on a regular basis. As Dorsey says, the internet excels at matching people with similar interests and ideas, but offers fewer options for meeting very different people nearby. Noonhat is a strikingly simple way to make that happen. I dig it. To give the site a try, sign up here.

I turned 25 last week so now I’m allowed to begin sentences with “These kids these days…” As in “These kids and their social networking sites.” CNET reports on how messages sent via Facebook and MySpace are displacing email among teenagers:

The future of e-mail might be found on the pages of MySpace.com and Facebook.

Just ask a group of teen Internet entrepreneurs, who readily admit that traditional e-mail is better suited for keeping up professional relationships or communicating with adults.

“I only use e-mail for my business and to get sponsors,” Martina Butler, the host of the teen podcast Emo Girl Talk, said during a panel discussion here at the Mashup 2007 conference, which is focused on the technology generation. With friends, Bulter said she only sends notes via a social network.

“Sometimes I say I e-mailed you, but I mean I Myspace’d or Facebook’ed you,” she said.

Just this weekend I was having a conversation with a friend about the annoyance of getting messages on social networking sites. We both agreed that we’d rather get email. We see the message faster, we don’t have to go to a separate website to read it, and it’s a lot easier to find in the future. Gmail is easier than Facebook is easier than (ick!) MySpace.

Yet when I needed to get in touch this week with some people I hadn’t been in contact with for a long time, I hypocritically turned my back on my expressed preferences and logged on to Facebook. This happens to be the kind of situation where I think messaging on social networking sites really comes in handy. Sending an email out of the blue would have been a little jarring and required some preamble. Facebook makes it casual. By being a part of each other’s news feed, attaching a photo to the message, and putting the message a click away from basic information like where we live, where we’re working, and what we’ve been up to lately, the site allows us to keep up the illusion of constant contact. The sudden email starts to feel like resuming a conversation you’d let drift just a few hours ago.

Clive Thompson at Wired describes a similar effect from using Twitter, another application that seems totally useless to people who don’t get the appeal:

When I see that my friend Misha is “waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop,” that’s not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

Email, for all its benefits, is lousy at creating this kind of social sixth sense. Imagine instead that email and Facebook worked together, automatically including a photo and profile information in place of the usual text signature for emails sent between friends. That would link it into the benefits of social networks and take off some of the professional edge that’s creeping over email among the younger set.

And maybe this would be good for professional messages, too. In my job doing media relations, I’m constantly in email and telephone contact with journalists and people booking shows around the country. The vast majority of the communication is pleasant but utterly forgettable. That’s too bad, because at both ends of the line we’d benefit from sustaining professional relationships. Journalists like to have people they can count on to deliver a source, and I like to have journalists I can count on to be interested in what I send them. In the long run we might both benefit when it’s time to look for new jobs. Attaching a face and some memorable biographic info to our exchanges would facilitate this kind of communication a lot better than the dead end of a text email does.

I don’t want to see email replaced and I’d really hate to see it become a crusty old tool used only by professionals. Finding ways to let it tap into the benefits of social networks seems like it could be the necessary next step in the medium’s evolution.

[Update: Grant McCracken and I must have been drinking the same water last night. H/t Chad.]

This week I was invited to join a cool new people search engine called Spock. Tim O’Reilly sums it up better than I can:

You can search for a specific person — but you can do that on Google. More importantly, you can search for a class of person, say politicians, or people associated with a topic — say Ruby on Rails. The spock robot automatically creates tags for any person it finds (and it gathers information on people from Wikipedia, social networking sites like LinkedIn…) but it also lets users add tags of their own, and vote existing tags up or down to strengthen the associations between people and topics. Users can also identify relationships between people (friend, co-worker, etc.), upload pictures, and provide other types of information. This is definitely a site that will get better as more people use it — one of my key tests for Web 2.0. It also illustrates the heart of a new development paradigm: using programs to populate a database, and people to improve it.

And it does that pretty well. When I logged in, the Spock bot had already tagged me accurately: single; Bachelor’s degree; International Brotherhood of Magicians; class of 2004; likes sailing; likes philosophy; likes politics; likes golf; likes Music; Friendster; Vanderbilt University; from Spring TX; Food & Beverages; Coffee Professional; single; atheist; athletic; college graduate; White / Caucasian; Cancer (sign); straight

That all comes from social networking sites. The problem is I’m spread across three profiles. One profile is from Friendster and LinkedIn, one is from MySpace, and one is the one I signed up with. It’s supposed to be possible to merge these all into one, but that feature is a little buggy right now.

A second difficulty the site has is telling people apart. It seems to succeed for people with unique names, but maybe not for common ones. Take a search for Patrick Michaels, one of the Cato Institute’s environment experts. The biography appears accurate but these three photos are attached to the profile:

There’s clearly something wrong here. The guy on the left runs a travel company. The guy on the right is a lawyer in Michigan. The guy in the middle matches the bio. They’re all Patrick Michaels.

This is where the voting comes in. Beside each of the photos is a small arrow. Clicking on it calls up a prompt to vote yes or no on the photo. By voting no on the two inaccurate photos, I bumped them off the profile. By voting yes on the middle one, I made it the default photo. A trail showing who has voted on the photo lends a little accountability. This is what O’Reilly is talking about when he mentions populating a database with programs and improving it with people. The interesting question is whether this will be enough to keep the site accurate. Another is how much control individuals will be able to exercise over their own information. (Spock is addressing the problem of entity resolution with a prize.)

The downside here is the possibility of false or private information getting out without the knowledge of the people involved. It potentially puts ordinary people in the position John Siegenthaler faced with his grossly inaccurate Wikipedia biography. But unlike Siegenthaler, most of us can’t call up our friends at USA Today and place a cantankerous column correcting the mistake.

Of course, people can libel each other on the internet without Spock. The self-correcting nature of the site arguably makes it safer than other online sources. The potential problem is with users taking it to be more authoritative than they should. A bigger problem might be true information about jobs, relationships, or sexual preferences becoming more public than individuals would like.

I tend to take David Brin’s view that greater transparency is inevitable and that it’s better to embrace that than to be delusional about one’s privacy. If you’ve got an online identity, odds are you’re profiled on Spock. And the best way to control that information is to get in early and clean it up.

Spock is invitation only while it’s in beta and I’ve got a lot of invites to give away. Leave a comment or send an email if you want one.

Finally, props to Spock for the FedEx-like logo that sports a subtle graphic that absolutely stands out once you notice it’s there.

Google Notebook has become one of my favorite ways of staying organized on the web. Unfortunately, my ability to install browser extensions at work is very limited, so I can’t use Google’s tool for adding notes on the fly.

Mitchelaneous offers a second best alternative with a neat way to add notes in the Firefox sidebar. It lacks the automatic copying of highlighted text that Google’s extension offers, but it’s still easier than opening Notebook in another window or tab. Get the easy directions here.

I didn’t fully appreciate the simple brilliance of GMail’s method of grouping emails into conversations until using Outlook at work last week. Conversations + powerful search was a fantastic improvement over sorting individual emails into clunky folders. Going back to the old system is head-bangingly frustrating now.

As it turns out, though, Outlook does have a rudimentary conversation feature (arrange by: conversation). It has problems: if the subject line changes it won’t recognize a thread as being one conversation, it combines separate emails with the same subject line into one thread, and it doesn’t include your replies within threads. Even so, if you stay on top of deleting old emails, it’s a useful feature and brings Outlook a little bit closer to Web 2.0 goodness.

Outlook users, any other tips for making the program more productive?

After reading this post on the new Rule the Web blog, I’ve been convinced that Twitter might actually be useful and signed up for an account. I’ll try not to get too distracted by it and use it only in moderation, just like I do coffee and alcohol. Oh, wait…

My Twitter updates should appear on the right sidebar. If nothing’s loading, it’s because of bugs or overload on the Twitter servers, so fear not. And if you’re on Twitter, add me as a friend. My username is jacobgrier.

Here’s a simple suggestion: why can’t physical mail addresses be more like email addresses?

Using a physical mailing address creates a big hassle every time I move. I have to contact all of my friends and family, the magazines I subscribe to, the online businesses I buy from, and the credit cards, banks, etc. that send me statements to let them all know that I’ve moved. This always takes a while and I invariably forget to tell everyone.

Contrast this with moving a website or email address to a new server. When I switch servers, I don’t have to notify everyone who emails me, reads my site, or links to my content that I’m moving. They use the address they’ve always used and the Domain Name System (DNS) automatically associates the domain name that people remember with the numerical IP address that computers use to communicate. I just have to tell one entity about the move (the DNS registry) and it takes care of the problem for everyone else.

It seems like computing technology is cheap enough now that our postal system should work the same way. Why should we have to remember cumbersome physical addresses and update all our contacts when we move? It would be a lot easier to simply use the equivalent of a domain name address and associate it in a database with a physical mailing location. Call it a Postal Name System (PNS). Everyone could have their own, easily memorized address to use for life. When people move, they just notify the PNS of the change and their postal name keeps functioning seamlessly, associating their postal address with their new physical location.

In other words, there’s no longer any reason why the physical locations where we live and work should have anything to do with the postal addresses people use to send us stuff.

This seems like it would be especially useful to businesses who now have to incur the costs of printing new stationery, business cards, signs, etc., when they move. People could also register multiple addresses and associate them with different physical locations. For example, someone starting a business out of their home could register an address that initially sends their work related mail there. Later, if the business expands to its own office, the address could be rerouted to the new location without having to print new materials or notify customers of the change.

Such a system might also be able to map email addresses on to postal addresses, if people choose that option. I’d love for friends to be able to just write jacob@jacobgrier.com on a letter, drop it in a mail box, and have it arrive at my house.

The US Postal Service already does something like this with mail forwarding. Its machines scan a written address, check to see if the person at that address has requested forwarding, and if he has slaps a label with the new address on the package. This is all translated into printed bar codes for machines to read. With this capability already in place, it seems like it would only need to be ramped up to accommodate a Postal Name System for associating addresses with physical locations.

ZIP codes were a very smart way of making mail delivery faster, but they have their roots in a system designed in 1943. Since then the use of postal codes has expanded but the way we address our mail hasn’t fundamentally changed. Perhaps that’s because we’re stuck with a postal monopoly, because this idea seems completely feasible with existing technology.